By the end of World War II, we were the most powerful and least damaged of the great nations. We also had most of the money. America's hegemony lasted exactly five years.
— Gore Vidal
A racial or religious or tribal identity is a kind of fact.
Until very recently, the artist was a magician who did his magic in public view but kept himself and his effects a matter of mystery.
Obama just came swiftly out of nowhere, which was a relief to those of us who care about the Republic, and at first he seemed a very good thing.
Americans have no idea of the extent of their government's mischief... the number of military strikes we have made unprovoked, against other countries, since 1947 is more than 250.
Some of my father's fellow West Pointers once asked him why I turned out so well, his secret in raising me. And he said, 'I never gave him any advice, and he never asked for any.' We agreed on nothing, but we never quarreled once.
It's odd to meet a rather elderly man who says, 'I've been reading you all my life.' It makes you feel a slight chill.
I can understand companionship.
The media can't get anything straight.
I could be a lot happier. I could be the senator from Aerospace taking bribes, and be quite happy.
American history has fallen more and more into the hands of academics.
Baseball is the favorite American sport because it's so slow. Any idiot can follow it. And just about any idiot can play it.
At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation and prejudice.
I hate nobody.
I was raised in the Washington household of my grandfather Senator Thomas P. Gore of Oklahoma, and have known politicians intimately all my life.
Of all recent presidents, Clinton was expected to behave the most sensibly in economic matters. He understood how the economy works. But because he had used various dodges to stay out of the Vietnam War, he came to office ill at ease with the military.
Since we have literally targeted our enemies, the Pentagon assumes that, sooner or later, rogues will take out our cities, presumably from spaceships.
After the French Revolution, the world money power shifted from Paris to London. For three generations, the British maintained an old-fashioned colonial empire, as well as a modern empire based on London's primacy in the money markets.
Jews, blacks and homosexuals are despised by the Christian and Communist majorities of East and West. Also, as a result of the invention of Israel, Jews can now count on the hatred of the Islamic world.
What the police in their ignorance have not figured out is that they have lost all credibility since World War II. They are sort of parasites on the fringe of society and do no particular good for anyone except possibly themselves.
I'm a fervent foe of water pollution, whether it is our own Hudson River or Philadelphia's tap water.
Washington turned a blind eye to Al-Qaeda.
You hear all this whining going on, 'Where are our great writers?' The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?
Every country should have at least one King Farouk.
Gossip is conversation about people.
Corporations must pay tax.
What I like least about myself is my belligerence.
He who is last had best laugh.
In character, as it were, the writer settles for an impression of what happened rather than creating the sense of the thing happening.
History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.
I was the most famous kid in the United States. That was 1936.
The Pentagon talks about our power to 'overkill' Russia ten times, twenty times, perhaps forty-eight times. For my tax money, it is sufficient to overkill them once.
Jack Kennedy very much enjoyed Fletcher Knebel's thriller 'Seven Days in May,' later a film. The story: a jingo based on the real-life Admiral Arthur Radford plans a military coup to take over the White House.
To prevent the theft of 'Ben-Hur's sets, guards were prowling the back lot long after production had been shut down.
In the German concentration camps, Jews wore yellow stars while homosexuals wore pink lambdas.
Why not just eliminate the federal income tax?
Policemen are seldom tried for their crimes, or indeed, held responsible for what they do, which disturbs the peace and causes distress among the orderly.
It's always best to stay out of other people's divorces. And their civil wars.
The truth about Pearl Harbour is obscured to this day. But it has been much studied.
Having no contemporaries left means you cannot say, 'Well, so-and-so will like this,' which you do when you're younger. You realize there is no so-and-so anymore. You are your own so-and-so. There is a bleak side to it.
The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country - and we haven't seen them since.
I cannot remember when I was not fascinated by Henry Adams.
What I am is something unbearable for the world of journalism and the world of cliches. I'm a realist.
I remember the Bond movies when I was a child. They were silent then.
It is very difficult for a writer of my generation, if he is honest, to pretend indifference to the work of Somerset Maugham. He was always so entirely there.
My father had lifelong contempt for politicians.
Because there is no cosmic point to the life that each of us perceives on this distant bit of dust at the galaxy's edge... there is all the more reason for us to maintain in proper balance what we have here. Because there is nothing else. No thing. This is it. And quite enough, all in all.
It is always a delicate matter, when a friend or acquaintance becomes president.
The American high school graduate is two years behind his English, French or German counterpart; in Alabama, God knows how far behind.
In August 1961, I visited President Kennedy at Hyannis Port. The Berlin Wall was going up, and he was about to begin a huge military buildup - reluctantly, or so he said, as he puffed on a cigar liberated by a friend from Castro's Cuba.
